In 1983, the video game industry crashed.  While almost certainly the impact of the now famous video game crash of 1983 has been overstated in the halls of gaming history, it is still a monumental occasion.  One of the largest markets in the world and, at the time, the center of the fledging video game industry effectively vanished over night.  Video games in the US went from a lucrative industry to a dead fad over the course of a couple of prominent game releases, only returning due to clever marketing by Japanese game company Nintendo essentially Trojan Horseing US retailers.  The Crash of 1983 is such a pivotal moment that it's not hard to wonder what would've happened if it didn't.  If maybe there was a higher standard of quality that made it so the industry could sustain itself, a way to combat the oversaturation of gaming and the dip in quality that followed.  What would that world look like?

Arcade Spirits - Dating in an Alternate History

What is Arcade Spirits?

Arcade Spirits is a 2019 dating sim that takes place in an alternate 21st Century wherein the video game crash of 1983 never occurred.  This game posits the consequences of this change resulted in two major cultural shifts: the first is that the 1980s culture continued indefinitely.  In the way Fallout kind of posits a world where the shift to nuclear power and the continued focus on vaccum tube technology instead of chips would cause culture to indefinitely stall in the 1950s; Arcade Spirits kind of implies that as a result of video games not crashing the world kind of stays in the 1980s.  The second consequence of this change is that arcades, hence the title, never go out of fashion.  They continue to exist as a viable business strategy into the 21st century, and they run the gambit from massive entertainment corporations to small mom and pop shops.

In Arcade Spirits you play as unemployed young adult that you can fill in with your own name and identity, though by default they are named Ari Cader.  Ari has recently been laid off from a job they really liked and has now been staying at home depressed, concerning their roommate and best friend Juniper greatly.  Juniper, as a result, decides to turn Ari onto a phone app she uses: Iris.  Iris is an AI personal assistant that can do a multitude of things for the user, keep track of their calendar, make notes, read e-mails, etc.  But its most relevant function is that the user can answer questions Iris has and with that information, as well as the data on their phone, Iris can find the user a career path that will make them happy.  Ari very quickly clocks that Iris is more than just an AI assistant, as the app seems genuinely concerned with helping Ari in life in a way that Juniper's Iris never seems to.

The virtual assistant sets Ari up with an interview at a local mom and pop arcade called "the Funplex".  The Funplex is run by a lovely old woman named Fran, who had been running it with her husband for many years before he passed away.  Fran is a bit of an idealist, something that her employees quickly inform Ari of and communicate their thoughts on.  Fran believes the arcade isn't just simply a business, but rather a place for people to find themselves.  She has fought hard to keep the arcade open despite steep competition and an inability to purchase new games, often having to resort to interesting garage sale and auction finds from decades ago, to keep this ideal alive.  She wants this to truly be more than just a cute little retro arcade, but a place for people to come together and grow.  She asks Ari if they are willing to be part of that dream, and after confirming, sets them to work manning the prize counter.

Romance On The Arcade Floor

With that, Ari is turned loose onto the arcade and begins to meet our collection of eligible dating options.  Arcade Spirits is heavily inspired by 80s workplace sitcoms, things like Cheers or Night Court.  The game heavily focuses around a core cast of characters made up of both the other employees of the arcade and the arcade's handful of regulars; a small but closeknit group of gamers who enjoy the simple, intimate atmosphere at the Funplex.  These characters also make up our pool of eligible dating options.  They are the following:

• Gavin - Gavin is the first character you're going to meet in Arcade Spirits, the no-nonsense manager at the Funplex.  He's precise and focused, his priority is on the business side of the Arcade, on trying to dig this place out of the hole.  Everything Fran isn't, Gavin is.  That's not to say, of course, that Gavin doesn't believe in Fran's ideals.  Even if he doesn't fully understand her all the time, Gavin does truly believe in the arcade and its sense of community.  He is just, you know.  A realist.  He sees the numbers and he sees they're not exactly good, especially since they are working with so many older arcade games that require frequent repairs and there is an ever dwindling cache of parts to repair them with.  This, along with his controlling personality and his frequency of getting lost in the numbers often puts him in conflict with the other members of the Funplex staff.  But, despite being such a stick-in-the-mud who doesn't seem to understand the magic of arcade games, Gavin does have his own secret gaming love: he's a pinball wizard.
• Naomi - Naomi is, quite literally, the character that the game was built around.  When they were planning out routes for this game, Naomi's came first and came fastest.  Naomi is the mechanic of the Funplex staff, she works on all the arcade machines in her "garage" in the back of the arcade.  Naomi has a hyperfixation on arcade restoration, something that often puts her at odds with Gavin.  Naomi sees the beauty in these machines, the sheer unadulterated magic they bring.  These machines are important to her, and her inability to throw anything out, while sometimes helpful as she frequently needs to repurpose parts for other machines, is clearly a symptom of her obsession.  She is also, as you would imagine, rather shy and awkward, keeping in the back for most of the day not just do to her "projects" but due to her lack of social skills.  Still, she's kind, affable, and once you get her talking about her favorite thing, it's impossible not to get pulled in by her exuberant energy.  In other words, she's on the spectrum!
• Ashley - Ashley is the last employee of the Funplex and the other person who works the floor.  Part customer service representative and part mascot, Ashley is the resident costume designer and cosplayer.  Comparatively to Gavin and Naomi, Ashely is a relatively well-adjusted young woman, being more friendly and outgoing and often being caught up in the center of the two's arguments as a result.  That is not to say, however, that Ashley isn't her own brand of quirky.  Ashley loves cosplay and definitely feels more comfortable in costume than out.  She also has a bad habit of getting TOO into character, especially at large events.  There's a convention scene in the game where Ashley is in cosplay the entire time and only drops character when she's in very small groups of her friends.  Her obsession with cosplay is just more than a special interest though.  Ashley is experimenting with her own gender identity.  She's recently gotten very into crossplay, she does a lot of cosplay of male characters and finds the feeling she gets dressing in traditionally masculine garb rather compelling.  She's also kind of a gremlin, she is shockingly THE member of the cast who is quick to go "what if we did something illegal".
• Percy - Percy is the first of the three romance options that isn't part of the staff of the Funplex.  Percy is a regular at the establishment who is particularly obsessed with the game "Mr. Moopy's Magic Maze", a parody of both Mappy (one of my favorite arcade games) and Pac-Man.  Percy is rich, smarmy and aloof, he's a British immigrant that moved into the area for his job in stock trading and due to both his effectiveness at said job and its pretty lax nature, he finds himself with loads of free time.  He devotes basically all his free time to the Funplex, trying to achieve a world record run in Mr. Moopy, his apparent life's goal.  Your first interaction with Percy speaks volumes, he's in hot water for hogging the machine and not letting people play, so he offers to buy the machine and let the arcade keep it for him so he has free reign to use it whenever he's here.  Percy can come across as kind of a jerk at first, but quickly you find out why he's like this.  Percy has a serious, incurable heart condition that has put a time limit on how long he has to live.  Combined with his lack of care for himself, much to his friends' chagrin, Percy is clearly obsessive over Moopy because he knows he has an expiration date and wants to leave his legacy on his favorite game.
• QueenBee - QueenBee is my wife.  QueenBee is a professional gamer, a notable figure in the Esports scene for the in-universe MOBA/Fighting game hybrid Fist of Discomfort.  She is not only a regular at the arcade, she is THE regular at the arcade, a prominent gamer and streamer who, thanks to some clever work by Naomi, is able to stream directly from the arcade, using their FoD machine.  In a way, this is a plus, the arcade gets a steady stream of revenue from the Queen as she spends her streaming sessions grinding FoD and battling people who stumble into the arcade wanting to test their best against a prominent figure.  However, QueenBee is not always attuned to the vibe.  She's arrogant, foul mouthed, has kind of a temper, and often ends up butting heads with other patrons, namely parents of small children, at the arcade due to these things.  That being said, she's also sassy and funny and gets along with the staff and most of the adult patrons fairly well, though obviously the group needs to tell her to chill out.  This arrogant personality is, however, a mask.  The Queen is hyper aware of her place as a woman in gaming, and especially a woman in professional gaming.  Bee is part of a prominent ESports team, and she knows that she is on there as a token woman.  There have been plenty before her and will be plenty after her, she knows exactly what her worth is to them.  A pretty face they can parade around as a mascot for a while until she gets "too old" (meaning like 26) and then the first loss they have, they get dropped for another.  QueenBee doesn't just want to be the best, she NEEDS to be the best, or else her career is over.
• Teo - The final of the romanceable options (at least in a normal playthrough), Teo, at first, seems like he's being propped up to be the token "bad boy".  He rolls up with his crew to the arcade and starts making kind of a ruckus, as his group dominates the dancing game machines.  He's sexy and flirtatious, the kind of guy who seems like he'd be bad news in these types of games.  Teo is the nicest guy in the cast.  Outside of his flirtatious personality, which is a thing he cannot stop no matter how hard he tries, Teo is incredibly selfless and puts the needs of others before his own almost 100% of the time.  He's the kind of guy who would check in on his friends at a party to make sure they were getting hydrated, just a total Golden Retriever.  Absolute himbo energy.  He also is very passionate about his craft, he's not only good at dancing video games, he is an excellent dancer.  His crew uses the dancing games at the Funplex as a means to sort of gameify their practice, they do like actual pro dancing at various events and organize flash mobs with other crews on occasion.  He also wants to better himself to a fanatical degree.  This is, however, his biggest weakness: Teo throws himself into projects very quickly and bounces around from place to place, project to project constantly.  He is quick to give up on dreams to embrace new ones, leading to him being kind of wishy-washy about important stuff.

Gameifying The Dating Experience

Now that we've met our core six, let's talk about the dating experience.  Ari is a bit of an awkward and reserved sort by nature, a realistic way of doing the classic gaming trope of a blank slate protagonist.  Ari is not super used to complex social situations and, moreover, people being attracted to them.  They've spent much of their life believing that they are cursed and have kind of opted to keep other people out of that curse.  Luckily for them, they have Iris!

This is one of my favorite things about Arcade Spirits, the gamefication of the dating experience.  Our wonderful virtual assistant, in an attempt to aid Ari in their romantic pursuits, has decided to put the process of romantic pursuits in terms that Ari will understand.  She cooks up an RPG stat screen for them, wherein she will keep track of the responses they give when talking to their potential romantic partners and raise their stats in kind.  As well, she will keep track of their affection with any specific potential partner as the game progresses, letting you know how far along you are with any specific route.  This not only serves as a fun and effective way to spice up the dating sim gameplay, it's also a very effective tool for getting new players into a dating sim.  It gives them a really clear and obvious system from which they can latch onto to ease them into it.

These minor RPG elements are not just for flavor, however.  The outcome of choosing to raise certain stat allows you to influence Ari's personality and how they interact with their friends and/or potential love interests.  The potential love interests all respond better to different responses, QueenBee will like it when you're sassier, Gavin will like it when you're direct, Naomi will like it when you're more kind, stuff like that.  And as you engage with these responses, you'll raise your stats in these areas, allowing you to be able to successfully perform various checks throughout the game that you need your stats at a certain level for.  Just in general, you won't be able to date a character unless your stats in areas they like are high, but these stats especially become useful in the endgame, as the final confrontation(s) are heavily influenced by your stats.

As well, much like an RPG, you are given direct consequences for the responses you choose.  This is not a game where you can maintain good relationships with everyone, while they all will always remain your friends, to get up there with one person does come at the cost of another.  Not only do they favor different stats but, after the first day, you are often choosing to hang out with one person at the cost of hanging out with another.  Certain members of the friend group will, by necessity, fade into the background as you pursue others and these consequences do have a major impact on the game.  More directly though, there are several points where you are thrust into a conversation between two of the friends and forced to choose between them.  As an example, Gavin and Naomi, due to their working relationship and entirely opposite personalities, are frequently caught in arguments.  Naomi's idealism vs. Gavin's realism.  In these scenarios you end up being the mediator often unless you just try and avoid both of them.  To agree with Naomi is to lower your affection with Gavin and vice-versa.  This might be a turn-off for some dating sim enjoyers, I know in dating sims like this people like to keep up good relationships with the entire cast.  But I really like it, I really like that there are consequences to your actions.

A Short, Spoiler-Free Review

Before we get into the actual plot and themes of the game, I want to give a quick spoiler-free review for those who might want to play it themselves and are bothered by games getting spoiled.  I really like Arcade Spirits.  I enjoy its cast of characters, the sort of workplace sitcom setting its going for, many of the individual storylines, and the fun and creative use of arcades and arcade games.  I also love how it utilizes this RPG stat system to great effect, I think that this is a good entry level dating sim because of it.  As someone new to dating sims, the only one I've really played outside of this is Huniepop which is really bad as a dating sim, having this familiar, more game-y aspect to it really eased me in.  I especially love what its main character arc is, I think this game has a lot to say about video game history, 80s nostalgia, and finding yourself in early adulthood.

That being said I do think that some parts of it are less than stellar.  I think its themes can get a bit muddied, especially in the latter half of the game.  The romances can feel a bit tertiary even though the majority of the gameplay is built around dating.  And I take issue with parts of the ending.  It's not by any means a perfect game, but I think it's incredibly strong and I think it's a great way to onboard people onto the genre in question if they maybe don't play dating sims and/or have only played meme dating sims like Hatoful Boyfriend.  8/10

Where Dreams Come True

As Fran establishes when you first meet her, the Funplex is not simply a business.  It's a place to find yourself.  A place where dreams come true.  And that goal of "finding yourself" of "making your dreams come true" is obviously very central to the plot.  As you could probably tell, a lot of the characters descriptions are about them either accomplishing their dreams or self-actualizing in some way.  QueenBee has made it as a professional gamer, but it has caused her a lot of mental and emotional stress.  Ashley is experimenting with her gender identity.  Stuff like that.

But the central arc of the game is Ari self-actualizing themself.  Ari enters into the Funplex as kind of a listless 20-something.  They believe that they are cursed, half-jokingly stating that there is some supernatural force that is at the center of their job and personal woes.  Ari is, as most 20 somethings are, directionless.  Their life had been dictated for so long by hard structures and now they are out on their own and they are drowning because of it.  It's actually a pretty neat touch that Ari has a background as a lifeguard, not just because it preps them for high stress environments like running the arcade floor, but it sets up a very good character trait: Ari is good at saving others even if their life is a mess.  The Funplex, while at first seeming like just a job they're doing, is the environment needed for Ari to self-actualize, to become what they were always meant to be.

Something I enjoy about this is that Ari's self-actualization is actually separate from the romance.  There's nothing wrong, of course, with a romance storyline having "a person self-actualizing because they want to be better for their partner" as an arc.  It's a very classic romance arc, especially in romantic comedies and workplace sitcoms, which Arcade Spirits draws a lot from.  However, I think it is nice that Ari does better because Ari wants to do better, and through that they become more confident and attractive to their potential romantic partners.  Ari finds themselves at the arcade in a very real way, they don't just thrive in the environment, they BECOME the environment.  We see them crave responsibility, asking Fran if they can take on more and more of the arcade's planning, eventually becoming its official events coordinator.  Everyone in the arcade may have a dream to find, but Ari finds their entire life here, and its a storyline I really like.

Polybius

Of course, we can't talk about Ari finding themselves and growing up without talking about the opposite, now, can we.  Enter Polybius.  Polybius is the only arcade machine present in Arcade Spirits that is not a parody of a known arcade machine, this is something that is analogous to a real world thing.  That being said, they definitely used Polybius because it is not real.  Polybius is one of gaming's most infamous urban legends.  The story goes that in the early 1980s, in the city of Portland, Oregon, a mysterious arcade cabinet started popping up in arcades around the city.  It was an abstract shooter similar to a game like Tempest, called "Polybius".  Polybius was, allegedly, an incredibly addictive arcade game that would cause players to play for incredibly long sessions, playing past exhaustion and allegedly causing the death of some players.  The people who played it would report psychoactive symptoms, hallucinations, night terrors, stuff like that, but that they would be drawn to the machine in spite of it.  No one was quite sure who made it or why, but those who remember it remember men in black occasionally descending on arcades to collect from the machine, not necessarily the coins, but data the machine had collected somehow.

Polybius is, almost without doubt, not real.  What likely happened is that a number of different memories had been conflated, creating this legendary game.  There was a lot of uncertainty around video games in the late 70s and early 80s, a lot of unexplained health issues were happening from people playing games but there had yet to be research into the why of it all.  Nowadays, we know that video games can be a trigger for epileptic seizures and other light-sensitive conditions, but back then there was a big question mark and, as such, a big panic around video games and their adverse health effects.  Couple that with parents and other figures paranoia around video game addiction and you have the basis for this hyper addicting, killer arcade machine that haunts us to this day.  And the men in black?  That actually WAS happening.  Arcade owners in Portland were commonly converting their arcade machines into gambling machines back in the day and, as such, there was an FBI crackdown on arcades in Portland.  They weren't collecting data from their secret killer arcade machine, mind you, but there were a number of black-suited men tampering with arcade machines in Portland in the early 80s.

Polybius enters Arcade Spirits in its second chapter, a chapter in which Naomi, Fran, and Gavin recruit Ari to aid them in obtaining new arcade machines for the arcade.  They inform Ari of a mysterious auction being hosted by an eccentric billionaire who saves arcade collections from going to estate sales.  This billionaire believes very strongly in the sanctity of arcades and so he buys entire collections once their owners have become deceased and does private auctions for the local arcades.  He then hosts extravagant parties on his dime for the arcade owners and staff to schmooze.  In this instance, the collection in question belonged to a recently deceased pop star who was pretty big in the 80s but after her success started to waver, she became reclusive and addicted to video games, spending much of her fortune on an arcade collection and spending her time in her personal arcade.

Naomi is sent to investigate the collection, attempting to find either arcade machines they could buy to fill niches in the arcade's classic game selection and/or broken machines that either could be fixed up for cheap or used for parts to repair other old machines.  When she doesn't return and the actual auction nears, Ari is sent to find her in the maze of machines.  That is when they stumble onto Polybius, and it draws them in, compels them with an almost supernatural force.  Polybius seems to sense that Ari is susceptible to its power, that because of their belief in having a cursed working life and having a stagnant social life, they are in a point where it can dig its hooks in and never let go.  It is counter to everything the game is trying to say, it represents the kind of stagnation that many people would find appealing.  A safe, comfortable life that never moves forward.  And it's one that Ari almost finds themselves embracing.  After all, they're happy right.

In the machine, they see a fragment of the popstar that once called this collection hers, sees someone who was content with their life.  But they were never happy.  They abandoned a real life for comfort, abandoned their career for the familiar.  And they beg Ari not to make the same mistakes they did.  To not let Polybius take them too.  And man, it's such a cool use of Polybius.  Arcade Spirits, being a game about arcade games, was always going to have to address the nostalgia of the 1980s in some meaningful way.  It is so easy to get caught up in idealizing the past, taking the best parts of an era and wishing we could live in it forever.  The 1980s especially has been one of the most beloved eras by pop culture, we still are living inside of 1980s nostalgia multiple decades after the 80s nostalgia boom should've ended.  But Arcade Spirits, despite its setting, is not about trying to idealize a time period that doesn't exist anymore.  It's about looking forward, it's about growing as a person and finding yourself.  So using this decades old urban legend, a longtime gaming mystery that people have been enamored with for years, as a representative of the inability to move forward is genius.  And by freeing themself from the pull of Polybius, Ari does begin to truly look forward.

The Actual Romance Part

I want to next talk about the romance because, admittedly, it's something I'm pretty mixed on.  Now, to be clear at the time of writing this, I have done one romance plotline, QueenBee's.  As such, I am not going to criticize the individual romance storylines because I don't have experience with them, nor am I likely too.  I will return to Arcade Spirits eventually but there are some romance storylines I'm just uninterested in pursuing and I don't think that's wrong of me to say.  So anything I say in the following section should be taken with the knowledge that I have only done the Queen's.  I don't expect that to matter but just in case I say something wrong and someone with more knowledge on Arcade Spirits is like "hey, this isn't really true", feel free to correct me!

So, I've previously mentioned that something I find interesting and a quality I like about this game is that Ari's growth as a character is not just about them wanting to grow up for their potential love interest.  They find their own sense of fulfillment in life and self-actualize as a result of that fact.  But a consequence of that decision is that, frankly, the actual romance can feel like a secondary element to the story.  A vast majority of the gameplay is built around you building relationships with many members of the cast but, ultimately, a lot of this game can function whether you date any of the options or not?  It feels like these characters are almost completely unchanged by their romantic relationships in any meaningful way or, if they are, it's one sided.  Again, I'm basing this off the QueenBee route and the other routes I had to engage with when she was busy, but it feels like Ari gives a lot to these characters in conversation but they don't give a lot to Ari back.

This is made even more clear by the fact that the actual dating sim portion of the game ends just after the halfway point of the game.  Following the structure of the workplace sitcom, the midgame is home to two "event episodes".  We'll be talking about the second one, the Beach episode.  The entire crew (including Juniper!) goes to the beach to celebrate after the previous event episode and has fun throughout the day.  They hit up the candy shop, the boardwalk arcade where Ari spent part of their childhood, play volleyball, all the classics.  This is also the point where your relationship gets locked in.  This game allows you to interact with the cast one final time and then, as you reach the end of the day, you will go on a date with the person you have the most affinity with, which will feature some sort of proclamation and you will go steady with the person at the end of this.  It's a good moment and I find it to be a satisfying conclusion to the actual romantic arc, but it does feel a bit odd that this dating sim's dating portion ends at about the 60% mark and then we go into the final arc with our relationship already having been sorted.

That's not to say the romance is irrelevant in the final part, of course.  Conflict does arise based on your romantic partner and your conflicting ambitions.  And in the game's final confrontation with the main antagonist of its final arc, your romantic partner comes with you and helps dictate the conversation.  But it does tend to feel like, somehow, in this dating sim the romance can become secondary and it's unfortunate.  I don't necessarily want to call it bad, because I understand the vision.  They wanted Arcade Spirits to seem more like a realistic relationship between two young adults, people who have their own lives who enter a mutually beneficial relationship that doesn't necessarily define either of them.  It's not an unwelcome inclusion in the world of romantic comedies, again I do think it's nice that this game treats Ari's self-actualization as something separate from their romance.  But I also can't help but feel weird that the romance in this dating sim feels like just a thing that happens sometimes.

The Commodification of the Arcade

Arcade Spirits does not exist in an idealistic utopia.  While the game does present an alternate universe that could hypothetically be seen as a gamer's paradise, it does not shy away from using this setting to criticize the modern games industry and, in general, the state of arcades nowadays.  The need to maximize profit over providing a solid gaming experience.  I don't know if you've been to an arcade in recent years or seen a video of an arcade, I recommend Brutalmoose's videos on arcades,  While arcades do still exist and do still provide players with arcade gaming experiences both new and old, it is not a secret that they've been overtaken by games designed to get players addicted and sink their money into. This is especially a problem in Japan, it's an old joke by now that Japanese gaming companies have stopped really making games and started making glorified slot machines utilizing their IPs.  There are probably more Castlevania Pachinko machines than there are Castlevania games.

In Arcade Spirits, this criticism takes the form of the game's main antagonist, arcade magnate Deco Nami.  Deco Nami runs a chain of arcades that is dominant in the industry, titled "Deco's Palace".  Deco's Palace is similar to real life restaurant/arcade chains like Chuck E. Cheese, GameWorks, Dave & Busters, and the failed DisneyQuest.  It's a massive entertainment center that combines a restaurant, bar, and arcade, designed almost like a casino in some ways.  It's meant to get people in the door and keep them playing for long periods of time, draining their money slowly but steadily.  Unlike the often chaotic but also tight knit vibe of the Funplex, Deco's Palace is massive, clean, and soulless.  It is just a business, and moreover it's a business designed to push other arcades off the map if they're considered even remotely a threat.  Deco is charming, but he's also very clearly sleazy, a complete and total shark who will eat whatever small fish he can get his mouth on.

Deco enters the story after the events of the Polybius section lead to Ari takeing over as the Funplex's event coordinator.  Ari hosts an event that is so successful that it puts the Funplex on Deco's radar as a potential threat.  Deco had always had an eye on the Funplex but even a heartless businessman has enough respect for one of the OGs like Fran, or at least is aware enough that trying to push her out would be a bad move for his relationships with the industry.  However, with this event doing well, even Deco is willing to make a risky play to snuff out a potential serious competitor.  Fran does not wish to sell, knowing that Deco is likely to turn the arcade into another soulless cash machine, if he does not close the location outright.

This meeting eventually results in Ari going to Deco's Palace for the first time in their life, bringing along one of their friends who is best equipped to talk about the business side of things (I brought Percy).  And getting an inside look at Deco's Palace is harrowing but in a familiar way.  Deco Nami's arcade is full of overpriced, low-quality, reheated food that is oversalted and has very little flavor otherwise.  The employees are not only indifferent to the goings-on in the arcade, but actively trying to detach themselves from the ecosystem, lest they be contracted into being free babysitters by the overwhelming amount of parents attempting to use the arcade as a day care.  The machines on the floor all bear the images of familiar faces, the in-game parallels to arcade legends in the real world, but none of them are even necessarily games.  They're coin pushers and ufo catchers and prize machines.  I'm really glad I brought Percy actually because of his direct connection to Mr. Moopy, and his reaction to seeing the timing based ticket machine that bears his name.

It's not difficult to see what Arcade Spirits is saying here.  Deco serves a dual role, he first represents the hyper consumerism that defines the era Arcade Spirits is riffing on.  If Arcade Spirits is a world where the 1980s kind of just continued, Deco represents the conclusion to that, the greed that defined the era, its most soulless parts.  The reason why most 80s kids have childhoods that are just commercials for choking hazards.  But in the context of the gaming space, Deco represents the modern arcade industry as a whole.  An industry that has given up making proper video games to optimize profit.  The industry that favors simplistic, addicting games designed to have quick failure and reward conditions rather than develop full scale games like the olden days that players will gather around and try to top their local leaderboards.

And it's a criticism that I am mixed on.  On the one hand, this makes perfect sense as the villain to this game.  Arcade Spirits is a game with a lot of reverence for the golden age of arcades and classic arcade machines in general.  This game was conceived of by watching arcade machine restorations and the preservation of traditional arcade cabinet is a massive throughline in the story.  There are many scenes where the characters discuss the work needed to keep these machines running and how, despite this, it's a worthwhile investment just to keep these games playable in any capacity.  To see someone just throw them all away in terms of profit is truly sad, a crime against games, game preservation, and against people who could be robbed of these games they may love.  And moreover to replace them with cheap, soulless cash-ins that wear the corpse of a dead IP is kind of a tragedy.

One the other hand, I feel like this is counteractive to the other themes of the game.  Like, Arcade Spirits does a good job of trying not to be just an "old games good, new games bad" sort of commentary on the games industry.  Despite being so steeped in 80s nostalgia, it also criticizes that nostalgia and those who live in it.  To turn around and then have such a heavy handed condemnation of the modern state of arcades feels about thematically iffy to me.  The truth is that arcades do have to get that bag, and these simplistic, for profit games are actually rather fun.  They are providing the arcade ecosystem games people want to keep playing, games they want to get good at, games they want to compare to their communities.  It feels a bit like Arcade Spirits is trying to have its cake and eat it too, both be about looking toward the future and clinging onto the past.  It's something I'm very mixed on, it feels like the story fails to really commit to anything in the end.

The Ending

Perhaps the most upsetting part about Arcade Spirits, though, is how it actually ends.  Not the actual resolution to the core conflict of the game, I find that part good, but the aftermath of the game's ending.  To those who have played Arcade Spirits, it is the most infamous thing about this game.  I have stated before that Arcade Spirits is going for a workplace sitcom sort of vibe.  This is a closeknit group of employees and regulars akin to a sitcom like Cheers.  But throughout the game they become more than that.  They become a group of actual friends, a group that chooses to hang out with one another outside of their pre-established location and who hold a deep love for each other.  The kind of friend group that actively chooses to stay together, even when the context of their friendship is removed.  Ari is the linchpin, mind, the thing that brought them all together, but they found each other as well.  It's an incredibly nice part of this game, that your core cast seem like they've become friends outside of just all being around this one person.

And then two of them leave.  I mentioned in the section about the stat system that there would be consequences to your choices throughout the game.  That choosing to hang out with people comes at the cost of hanging out with other people and agreeing with one person in conversation will lower your affection with the person they're arguing with.  And that the game is tracking all these decisions throughout the game, building your affection with some characters and reducing it with others.  This is where that matters.  At the end of the game, the two characters you hold the least affection with will leave the friend group.  The game does a "where are they now" reel, going through each characters post-game lives and whichever two you held the lowest with just drift away.  This is frustrating, not because like "if I had known this would happen, I wouldn't have made the decisions I did".  I like that the actions you take in this game have notable consequences.  It's frustrating because the game has established that this group of 8 people has become very close and it repeatedly states that they're going to work together and build each other up.  They put so much work into making them seem like a group so closeknit that they're basically family.  And then two of them leave.  It just does not feel properly in line with what the game is otherwise telling us and it's just a bit of unnecessary, out of nowhere sadness to close the game out.

Final Thoughts

I already established this in my review but despite my numerous criticisms, I do really like Arcade Spirits.  I think when it is good, it's an incredibly fun and compelling story about finding yourself using the medium of gaming and the locale of an arcade to accomplish that goal.  It's a very fun workplace sitcom with a lot of interesting characters that are all endearing in different ways.  And it's clear the people who made it have a lot of love for all facets of gaming culture, representing preservationists, esports players, cosplayers, score chasers, etc.  And especially if you are coming into a dating sim for the first time, this game is an excellent starting point, utilizing familiar language to make the player more comfortable within its world.

But it is imperfect, and the ways it is imperfect are frustrating.  It feels like it's thematically all over the place, contradicting itself in key ways.  The romance feels more mature and like an actual adult romance, but because of that it can feel secondary in the story, sometimes it feels like the third most important thing in the story even.  And, of course, the ending is just frustrating.  Its messy, but it's also good when it gets there.  I look forward to eventually returning to it someday, though I promise I won't write a whole other review when that happens.  It's a solid 8/10, big recommend.